Two experiments involving a total of 177 infants 8 to 11 months of age found that subjects used a global processing strategy like adults' in discriminating transformations of a six-tone melody. Subjects needed melodic contour and frequency range to judge new sequences, but, in easy tasks, they also used absolute frequency. (CB)

This study evaluated the ability of 30 normally developing children (ages 6-12) to report the perceived location of a stationary fused auditory image (FAI) or track a "moving" FAI. Although subjects performed at normal adult levels with the stationary sound measure, they exhibited a significant age-related trend with the moving sound…

Two experiments tested whether newborns could discriminate their own and another newborn's cry. Results indicated that awake newborns expressed facial distress more frequently and longer to another newborn's cry than to their own. Sucking decreased significantly between pretest phase and first minute of another infant's cry. Asleep infants'…

Two experiments used phoneme counting tasks to investigate the foundations of phonemic awareness. Found that first graders and college students had some ability to distinguish between monophthongs (as in "he") and diphthongs (as in "how"), and they tended to count fewer "sounds" for syllables ending with the more…

Three experiments examined the perception of a three-way voicing contrast by monolingual speakers of English. The results demonstrate that the perceptual mechanisms used by adults in categorizing stop consonants can be modified easily with simple laboratory techniques in a short period of time. (Author/PN)

Fifty-four kindergarten children were screened with the Sapir Developmental Scale to highlight deficiencies in bodily schema, perceptual motor skills, and language development, and were matched in groups of three by score, chronological age, and sex with one of the three acting as control. Three first grade classes were organized as follows: one…

This monograph is a collection of papers describing a series of loosely related studies of visual attention, auditory stimulation, and language discrimination in young infants. Titles include: (1) Infant Attention and Discrimination: Methodological and Substantive Issues; (2) The Addition of Auditory Stimulation (Music) and an Interspersed…